


Hard Reset

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Disaster bisexual x functional-passing disaster bisexual, F/M, Face-Sitting, Oral Sex, Pegging, palamedes sextus gets pegged (for his health) nobody @ me, that's it that's the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:27:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22181788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: The problem with being the greatest necromancer of your generation is that your mind never stopsgoing, and sometimes, it'sexhausting. Sometimes, you just want somebody to turn you off for a while.Palamedes Sextus gets pegged. For his health.
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 22
Kudos: 175





	Hard Reset

In a good month, what happens is:

Palamedes pushes himself back from his bench, and there are no samples of blood diseases fanned out like clumps of drowned lace on the high-res microscopic array, and he retreats to the Warden’s quarters. He digs out a silk dressing gown, a piece of watercolour Seventh-House frippery, with long, moth-wing sleeves and extravagant whorls of lush, decaying colour; a blushing topaz like a rotten peach, venously crimson like an emergency light going off. In a good month, he knows what a peach looks like, because in a good month, he won’t have skipped  _ too _ many mandatory UV solarium shifts. 

(You go a little crazy, between the blackout windows planet-side and the half-your-life on a satellite, you go a little crazy if you don’t see something green,  _ alive _ -green, every once in a while, and nobody wants a repeat of the Enrichment Center Incident. And anyway, it helps with the oxygen-scrubbing.)

In a good month, Camilla tries not resent that the robe was a gift from Dulcinea, and, in a good month, she mostly succeeds.

In a good month, what happens is that Palamedes digs out the robe, and spends several days casting himself into increasingly calculated attitudes of louche repose, throat tipped back invitingly, shirts open beneath his robe. He sprawls, thumbing idly at his bared sternum while reading, in contrast to his usual intent hunch. He  _ lounges, _ looking feline and sybaritic, or at least as feline and sybaritic as a person can look in a silk dressing gown and a tatty pajama set with a loose cuff and an extravagance of mysterious chemical burns. Feline and sybaritic and decidedly absurd.

Here’s a good month:

It’s been about a week of this, and Palamedes has one leg thrown up over the back of his chair, the other sprawling loosely to the side, and the whole arrangement is pulling the thin fabric of his pajamas invitingly taut over the vague shape of his cock. There is a pen in his mouth, and he is reading, or pretending to read, scribbling unreadable marginalia, and he looks ridiculous, all elbows and angles, but not, to Cam’s eternal chagrin,  _ bad. _ He looks like he desperately wants somebody to make him stop, he looks  _ good _ , trying too hard, but  _ good, _ which is the whole point, and they both know it, and so she refuses to give him the satisfaction. Can’t make things  _ too _ easy. It’d be insulting. It’d spook him, if it was easy.

It would make the whole thing something it isn’t.

She braces herself against the arm of his chair, lets herself loom over him, close enough to feel the heat of his skin, but not close enough to touch, and hooks her finger over the spine of whatever it is he’s reading, tugging it down for examination.

“What’s this?” she drawls cooly.

He fixes her with a withering look, rolling his head to stare at her over the tops of his glasses.

“You  _ know _ what it is.”

Cam blinks.

Palamedes blinks back.

His stare goes on forever, silvery and hard like smashing headlong into a vault door, dry as the inside of an airlock. Camilla’s is the lightless flatness of deep space.

He breaks first.

“Can we  _ please _ ,” he groans, scrubbing at his face with one palm, glasses pushed up over his knuckles, “have sex?”

“Okay.” She shrugs, pulling back with a smirk. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“Excruciating,” he counters.

Dramatic.

The Master Warden’s rooms adjoin the Main Archives directly, the better to stalk around the shelves like a territorial stray at all hours, and it’s only because Palamedes is so  _ long _ that his bed is bigger than anybody else’s. And even the Master Warden’s privilege of an extra foot or two of mattress is kicked into claustrophobia by the cheerfully psychotic tangle of Palamedes’ inscrutable, spidery handwriting laid out over scrap flimsy on every flat surface, and the towering, dubiously architectured heaps of books that close in on every side.

Palamedes discards his glasses on top of one of them, and Camilla scoops them up, rolling her eyes.

“I despair sometimes, Warden, of the way you live,” she sighs, polishing the lenses on the corner of her shirt.

Palamedes snorts, shirt halfway over his head.

Still, it’s better, Cam thinks, laying the glasses safely aside, shrugging out of her clothes, better this than a  _ bad _ month, where he’s sparking around the lower decks like an engineering fault, or plastered to his bench, or pacing unstable, decaying orbits around obscure corners of the Archives because he can’t bring himself to _ ask _ for anything.

It’s because things get so loud for him. His mind never stops going, and it wrings him out like an old towel, and he wants, Camilla knows he wants somebody to reach in, and just turn it off. 

And in a good month, they can just...be, and Cam will do whatever it is that will give him twenty minutes’ peace without anybody thinking about the people they are, or the people they wish they were. Because it’s what a good cavalier would do. What good  _ friend _ would do.

In a good month, the rest is unimportant.

She perches on the corner of the mattress, and waits.

He looks somehow  _ more _ naked without his glasses, suddenly gone very, very still, knees drawn up and staring intently into the middle distance, tugging self-consciously at his neck.

“Warden,” she drawls, “stay with me.”

He uncurls fractionally, sucking in a long, shaky inhale.

“I am  _ begging _ you,” he says, face scrunching up, prissy and disgusted, “not to call me that while my dick is out.”

Palamedes reaches for her hand.

Cam follows him down.

There are ways, and it’s not  _ always _ sex, but it is, often enough, and God knows why she keeps indulging the impulse;

Because he’s always stretching his throat back at neck-breaking angles and it should be disgusting, but mostly it makes her want to bite at his jaw, and because he makes a low, gravely, pleased hum somewhere in the pit of his chest when she does, and then it’s because it looks inviting, with his chin tipped up like that, and then she’s bracing herself against the wall with one hand while she rides his face, wrapping the other around the base of his skull to tug him up closer, because his hair isn’t long enough to pull.

Because he’s good at it, licking into her with a steady, unrelenting pressure, because he stops, sometimes, to nuzzle his temple against her thigh, because he’s tall enough that he can reach up to roll her nipples between his fingers, because his fingers are long, his hands are long, because one of them is enough to cover her breast completely, because he does that with one hands, and thumbs at her clit with the other, and has no higher aspiration, apparently, then to eat her out for the next twelve hours. Because when she does finally peel herself away, thighs burning from the effort of staying upright, he is only a  _ little _ smug about it.

There’s a glassy, sated fog starting crowd in at the corners of his eyes, jaw still slick and shiny, one arm thrown across his eyes. 

“Is it my turn now?” he murmurs drowsily, half-hard and making no move to do the slightest thing about it.

“That depends,” Cam scoffs, sliding to the edge of the bed, “How hard are you willing to work?”

“I can’t move,” he purrs, eyes slitted lazily, watching her disappear until only the shadowed line of her spine remains visible, thrown into relief as she rummages under the bed.

She straightens, leaning back onto one elbow and tracing her fingers up his leg, and Cam is gentle, feather-light all the way up to his thigh, and then abruptly she  _ swats _ , hard, right in the hollow of his hip. 

“Make an effort.”

He squawks peevishly as the bottle of lube hits him square in the chest.

Cam stands, stoops again, while a series of slick noises and stuttering breaths over her shoulder confirms that Palamedes is, in fact, making an effort, and shimmies into the harness.

He’s got two fingers knuckle-deep by the time she turns back around, pupils blown so wide his eyes look nearly as dark as her own. He swallows heavily, panting, and lifts a shaky hand towards her cock. Curls his fingers around it, intent, drags them all the way down the base of the dildo and back up, hands long and fine-boned and beautiful.

“That’s effort?” she snorts, batting his hand away. “Try harder.”

“Cam—” he groans, falling back to the mattress, the whole raw-boned length of him splayed out and tense, and she just—

It’s because he makes a ragged, gut-punched noise when she finally rocks into him, voice scraped low and rough, because his back arcs clear up off the bed, because his hips are so narrow, jutting up into her hands like they want to be there, because he grinds himself down against her cock with an almost unhinged abandon, hands flinching and spasming at his sides. Because he whines, just a little, throwing his head back again when she  _ snaps _ her hips, because that’s  _ such _ a noise, because his legs tremble and his chest heaves, shoulders straining, some avian extremophile trying to break out of orbit, because for all his underfed, long-boned gauntness, his shoulders are so wide.

It’s because he doesn’t resist, not at all, when she tugs at one of his wrists, guiding his hand up to his cock, flushed and leaking, straining against his stomach, and tells him to  _ make an effort _ , because he reaches up with the other hand to press hers harder into his hip. Because before he comes, open-mouthed, on a long, soft exhale, his eyes flutter open for just a split second, and they look like lightning seen from high-atmo, a long way off.

Because it’s not about any of that; it’s the boneless, drowsy languor he falls into in the aftermath, hopped up on an endorphin cocktail and not thinking about anything at all.

“There’s a joke here somewhere,” he snickers breathlessly, blinking myopically at his filthy palm as if the sight is somehow utterly baffling, completely new, “‘Warden’s Hand’.”

“That is.  _ Disgusting. _ You’re disgusting,” she huffs, snapping a rag at his chest. “I should stab you.”

“Joke there, too.”

In a good month, this is how they end up:

Palamedes, newly clean, wedges himself at a skinny diagonal underneath her legs, curled on his side with both of her knees pulled over one of his shoulders, cuddling one of her calves to his chest like a plush toy.

Cam yawns, half-heartedly finger-combing the sweat away from her hairline.

“You couldn’t have gotten the nice boy from Quantum Informatics to do this for you?”

As if anyone else could ever be an option. As if anyone else could be trusted to. 

But the gesture matters, it’s  _ important _ , the gesture of pretending it could be anyone keeps  _ this _ what it is, and not something else.

“Don’t be insulting, Cam,” he murmurs into her knee, “you know my stance on quantum anything.”

“Oh, I am well aware of Quantum Informatics’  _ stance, _ ” she says archly, jostling him with her leg. “His cavalier leaves her left open.”

“The  _ carelessness _ . I should impose research sanctions.”

His thumb strokes over the hard bone of her ankle, back and forth.

And he doesn’t thank her, he never thanks her, because that, too, would make it something else, he just curls his hand around her ankle and nuzzles into her knee and says:

“Cam? Where are my glasses?”

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to the humble origins of the nsfw channel of the GtN discord.


End file.
